I have now listened to the ⁦ @KnowYrEnemyPod⁩ episode w/⁦ @samuelmoyn⁩ and although it’s excellent, I have to disagree with his semi-walk-back of the claim that Never Trump conservatives are responsible for defeating Sanders. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-know-your-frenemies-with-samuel-moyn

This is in light of Saldin & Teles pointing to Black voters in the South Carolina primary, as opposed to the other Never Trumpers who enthusiastically agreed w/Moyn that they destroyed Sanders.

As Moyn says, the longer-standing Dems would rather have it be seen that Dems defeated Sanders than that Republicans did so in a Democratic primary.

However, I have to disagree with @samuelmoyn’s accession to Saldin & Teles: that the focus is properly on South Carolina. The further we get from it, the less believable that account becomes, because consider what happened both before and after it.

I for one was told in pretty clear terms in December 2018 that there’s no way the Democratic Party would allow either Sanders or Warren to be the nominee, and consequently even when each was doing well at different stages of the primary, they lacked allies they should have had.

And even before that, when I was peddling a “new,” populist economic policy to Democratic senators after 2016, their own staffers told me & my colleagues that all their bosses wanted to hear about was Russia b/c they wanted a way in which Trump was something imposed from outside.

And then after South Carolina, think of how instantaneously the party coalesced behind Biden, including Warren stabbing Sanders in the back. That simply is not the work of primary voters in one state, but rather a suddenly agreed upon, convenient pretext.

To bring it to the Never Trumpers, what neither @samuelmoyn nor @SamAdlerBell nor Sitman say on the podcast is that their migration to the Dems is something elite Dems have been seeking to effectuate for basically my whole adult life. They weren’t going to let Sanders ruin that.

Think what would be happening right now if Sanders were the nominee: lots of people on op/ed pages lamenting there’s no one they could vote for. Biden’s people are more or less openly gleeful about the fact that the defeat of the left means the deep state will side against Trump.

That makes heading into a disputed election a lot less scary than it would be with Sanders as the nominee. And the Never Trump people are very much a part of that. It was the explicit theme of the Niskanen Institute conference in February 2019. They won.

What the @KnowYrEnemyPod folks are right about when they step back is the larger point that this elite centrism that is now in power in the Democratic Party is much more eager to form an alliance with the right, so long as it’s capitalist, than it is with the left.

And I fear that’s where we’re headed when all is said and done.